As you may have heard, the Westboro Baptist Church plans a series of protests in Vermont on Sept. 1.
The group, which sums up much of its point of view with the very title of its Web site (
www.GodHatesFags.com), says it will make three stops in Montpelier and three in Burlington on that day, apparently to mark the first day that same-sex marriage will be legal in Vermont.
Here's the dilemma: What is the best response - do the media ignore the group or cover them so people know what it's all about?
It is truly a dilemma. As I mulled this today, an article came across my computer screen by Charles Davis, an assistant professor at the Missouri School of Journalism and executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition, prompted by the recent rage at health-care forums:
"Hate, shuffled off stage in the post-racial haze of the election of the
nation’s first black president, is back with a vengeance. Hate, if it ever truly
threatened to leave the political stage, is most definitely back, larger and
nastier than ever.
As a near-absolutist First Amendment advocate, my prescription for hate
speech is always more speech: Give the bigot a microphone as big as the hatred,
I say, and watch as the marketplace of ideas works its magic.
Perhaps that’s why I worry, as I watch an emboldened mob grow more
irresponsible with each passing day, that the mainstream media fails to give
hate the coverage it deserves today.
"My proposition is simple: Major news organizations need to cover hate the
way they once did — as a standalone beat."
I don't know that we're talking about hate as a full-time beat, but there's an argument for shining the spotlight, just as there are surely arguments for ignoring it.
- Terri Hallenbeck
Labels: hate, journalism, same-sex marriage, Westboro Baptist Church
The crowd at the Council of State Governments Eastern Regional Conference in Burlington heard a speech today on a topic near and dear to me: The future of state news reporting. If speaker Pete Hamill had the answer I wanted to hear it.
So did he have the answer? Sort of. He offered a hint of hope.
Hamill, who started his career at the New York Post and has written nine novels, set the stage by reminding the crowd that the media is essential to democracy, to teaching people about their community. "The need to explain is always there," he said.
Hamill warned the group of the peril society faces. On a subway in New York City recently, he recounted, a few people were reading papers but the majority either "thumbers" working their BlackBerries or people just staring into space. The Internet that those thumbers were accessing poses a daunting challenge to media, who haven't yet figured out how to make a living off it.
Hamill said he thinks one possible solution is charging for content online. The Wall Street Journal does it. I read recently that the Daily Gazette in Schenectady is going back to that. It should be clear soon whether that will help, he said. "We'll know better in maybe 11 minutes the way things are going. Certainly by the end of the year."
Will it be enough? Hamill hopes so, and perhaps he persuaded a roomful of lawmakers to hope so.
"We need it because the essence of our democracy is at risk," he said.
- Terri Hallenbeck
Labels: journalism, Peter Hamill, politics, Vermont
